On Wednesday, 3 April 2013, Professor Roderick Beaton (Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature, and Director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies at King’s College London) will give a talk entitled:
“Rewriting Ancient Tragedy, Re-inventing Ancient Greece: Shelley’s Hellas in Literary and Political Context.”
The talk will take place in Room 417 (4th floor, New Philosophy Building) at 7:15 pm.
Below you can find the speaker’s short bio and paper abstract.
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“Rewriting Ancient tragedy, Re-inventing Ancient Greece: Shelley’s Hellas in Literary and Political Context”
Abstract
The English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, living in exile in Pisa with his wife Mary (author of Frankenstein), at the end of 1820 made the acquaintance of Alexandros Mavrokordatos, one of the future leaders of the Greek Revolution. As a result, the Shelleys were unusually well informed about events in Greece during the first few months of the Revolution, which broke out in March 1821. Shelley’s Romantic ideal of Greece as the timeless symbol of the perfectibility of humanity was forced into collision with his concurrently held political commitment to radical liberalism. In the dramatic poem Hellas (published 1822), these different ways of ‘imagining’ Greece become fused in the new, at the time emerging, concept of the ‘nation’, which at once stands outside time and becomes an aspiration to be fulfilled in an actual future.
Short bio
Roderick Beaton is Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature, and Director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies, at King’s College London. His books include the literary biography: George Seferis, Waiting for the Angel (2003), and The Making of Modern Greece: Romanticism, Nationalism and the Uses of the Past, 1797-1896 (co-edited with David Ricks, 2009). He has recently completed a three-year research project on Byron and Greece funded by the Leverhulme Trust. His book Byron’s War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution will be published by Cambridge University Press in April. He is co-organiser, with Chris Kenyon-Jones, of the 39th International Byron Conference, to be held at King’s College London from 1-6 July 2013. Information about this conference can be found at:
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/chs/events/Byron-Conference/index.aspx.
